Teacher Margaret's "View From My Window" - September 5th

Dear Friends, 

Welcome to Westfield Friends School. We talk about the Westfield community as one of its defining strengths as a school. Community is the “C” in our Quaker SPICES - the testimonies we strive to live daily. In the first days and weeks of school, every teacher will help their students come together to form their class’s community with aspirations, norms for behavior, and goals for each other. 

Children create fluid and informal communities when they are on the playground. Throughout the year, we will come together in multi-age groups we call our Buddies Program. We join as a worshiping community every Wednesday and a singing community once a month. Students are part of other communities - their families, the people around the table for dinner, neighborhood friends, swim teams and art classes, churches, mosques, and synagogues. 

As adults, Westfield is a community where we support each other in the messy, wonderful, never-finished work of helping children on their journey to being capable, adaptable, empathetic, and positive adults. I regularly meet parents of alums who tell me they met their lifelong, closest friends raising children together at Westfield. When we volunteer to help with a class or school event, come to a Family Council meeting, or socialize at a birthday party or Saturday playdate, we listen and learn from each other's joys and sorrows. We are in this together, and together we help our children learn the many meanings of community. Diane Butler Bass summarizes this alchemical process well, 

“While communitas is the spirit of community, communion reminds us that the commons is also a mutual sharing of gifts and interdependence. Communing implies empathy, listening, developing a reciprocal sense of the other, whether God or nature or a neighbor. Practicing communion holds communitas to moral engagement; the “spirit” we experience together must be invested in feeding one another, serving with kindness and mercy, using minds and hearts on behalf of others, and caring for creation”. Diane Butler Bass, Grounded (New York, Harper Collins) p. 255

We are in this together, thank you for helping co-create our community.

Warmly,

Margaret Haviland

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